An uncued brain-computer interface using reservoir computing

Brain-Computer Interfaces are an important and promising avenue for possible next-generation assistive devices. In this article, we show how Reservoir Comput- ing – a computationally efficient way of training recurrent neural networks – com- bined with a novel feature selection algorithm based on Common Spatial Patterns can be used to drastically improve performance in an uncued motor imagery based Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The objective of this BCI is to label each sample of EEG data as either motor imagery class 1 (e.g. left hand), motor imagery class 2 (e.g. right hand) or a rest state (i.e., no motor imagery). When comparing the re- sults of the proposed method with the results from the BCI Competition IV (where this dataset was introduced), it turns out that the proposed method outperforms the winner of the competition

A Novel Neural Network Classifier for Brain Computer Interface

Brain computer interfaces (BCI) provides a non-muscular channel for controlling a device through electroencephalographic signals to perform different tasks. The BCI system records the Electro-encephalography (EEG) and detects specific patterns that initiate control commands of the device. The efficiency of the BCI depends upon the methods used to process the brain signals and classify various patterns of brain signal accurately to perform different tasks. Due to the presence of artifacts in the raw EEG signal, it is required to preprocess the signals for efficient feature extraction. In this paper it is proposed to implement a BCI system which extracts the EEG features using Discrete Cosine transforms. Also, two stages of filtering with the first stage being a butterworth filter and the second stage consisting of an moving average 15 point spencer filter has been used to remove random noise and at the same time maintaining a sharp step response. The classification of the signals is done using the proposed Semi Partial Recurrent Neural Network. The proposed method has very good classification accuracy compared to conventional neural network classifiers. Keywords: Brain Computer Interface (BCI), Electro Encephalography (EEG), Discrete Cosine transforms(DCT), Butterworth filters, Spencer filters, Semi Partial Recurrent Neural network, laguarre polynomia

Learning Representations from EEG with Deep Recurrent-Convolutional Neural Networks

One of the challenges in modeling cognitive events from electroencephalogram (EEG) data is finding representations that are invariant to inter- and intra-subject differences, as well as to inherent noise associated with such data. Herein, we propose a novel approach for learning such representations from multi-channel EEG time-series, and demonstrate its advantages in the context of mental load classification task. First, we transform EEG activities into a sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral images, as opposed to standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore such spatial information. Next, we train a deep recurrent-convolutional network inspired by state-of-the-art video classification to learn robust representations from the sequence of images. The proposed approach is designed to preserve the spatial, spectral, and temporal structure of EEG which leads to finding features that are less sensitive to variations and distortions within each dimension. Empirical evaluation on the cognitive load classification task demonstrated significant improvements in classification accuracy over current state-of-the-art approaches in this field.Comment: To be published as a conference paper at ICLR 201

Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page